At the end of September 1520, Suleiman succeeded his father as Sultan of the Ottoman Empire at the age of twenty-five, inheriting a vast and expanding Muslim state that had already conquered Constantinople and much of the Balkans. Within the imperial palace at Istanbul, among the women of his household, was a young slave girl from the borderlands of Poland and Ukraine, a captive who would one day rise to become the most powerful queen the Ottoman world had ever seen. Born around 1502 in the town of Rohatyn, in the Ruthenian region that is now western Ukraine but was then a province of the Kingdom of Poland, she had been captured during a slave raid in 1516 and taken to the Crimean port of Kaffa. From there she was shipped to Istanbul, the Ottoman capital, and placed in the imperial harem, an enormous household within the palace that held the Sultan’s wives, concubines, female relatives, and servants.
There she acquired the name Hurrem, a Persian word meaning joyful or laughing. The name Roxelana, by which she is also known, was applied to her much later by European observers and roughly meant the maiden from Ruthenia. Hurem became the concubine of Suleiman in 1520, just as he took the throne. Her rise among his household was swift.
In 1522 she gave birth to their first child, a boy named Mehmed. Three more sons and a daughter followed within four years, and a final son arrived in 1531. The birth of so many children marked her ascent above the ordinary status of a concubine, for Ottoman practice generally restricted a concubine to bearing only one son to the Sultan. Despite her favored position, Hurem and Suleiman remained unmarried for many years.
The union presented serious problems. She was a European, and more troubling still, an Eastern Orthodox Christian rather than a Muslim. The Ottoman nobility and the empire’s power groupings could not be expected to accept such a marriage easily. But in 1534, Suleiman’s mother, Hafsa Sultan, who held the title of queen mother, died.
So long as she lived, no concubine could be allowed to rise above her station. With her death, the obstacle was removed. In 1536, Suleiman married Hurem, making the slave girl from Ruthenia his legal wife and queen, Hurrem Sultan. The marriage caused a stir across Europe.
A representative of the Bank of Genoa working in Istanbul reported to his superiors that this week there had occurred in the city a most extraordinary event, one absolutely unprecedented in the history of the sultans. The Grand Signor, the Sultan, had taken to himself as his empress a slave woman from Russia. There was great talk about the marriage and none could say what it meant. The union was one of genuine affection.
A considerable correspondence between Suleiman and his wife survives, and it clearly indicates their love for one another, with Hurem writing to him while he campaigned in the Balkans and the Levant. Their bond also broke with tradition. While the consort was normally expected to remain at the palace only while her children were growing up, Hurem spent all of her later life at Topkapı Palace, the main residence of the Ottoman sultans. Her influence extended far beyond the household.
She took a prominent role in the government of the empire, a wholly novel development for an Ottoman queen. She transformed the imperial harem into an institution that exercised considerable political power in Istanbul, paving the way for what historians have termed the Sultanate of Women, an extended period during which women played an important role in governing the vast empire. This began under Hurem and lasted for over a century. Much of her influence lay in foreign relations at a time when the empire was rapidly expanding, conquering Hungary, parts of North Africa, and much of what is now Iraq.
Hurem may have been pivotal in ensuring that Suleiman did not go to war with her native Poland. There was even direct correspondence between Hurem and Sigismund II Augustus, king of Poland, from 1548 to 1572, the only known instance in the early modern period of an Ottoman queen in direct contact with a European monarch. This contact may well have contributed to the formation of an alliance between the Ottomans and the Polish kingdom in 1551, which lasted for most of two decades. Hurem also emerged victorious from a power struggle over the succession to the Sultanate.
Ottoman succession was not determined through primogeniture as in Europe. Each Sultan had many sons, often from different mothers, and one was chosen by the Sultan as the fittest to succeed. By the 1550s, Suleiman had four living sons from his unions with Hurem and his other senior consort. Three, Selim, Bayezid, and Cihangir, were sons of Hurem.
But the eldest, Mustafa, had been born in 1515 to Suleiman and Mahidevran, and for many years he was considered the heir apparent, popular within the Ottoman army and experienced in senior military and governatorial positions. In 1552, during a war with the Persian Empire, Mustafa came under suspicion of plotting to remove his father from the Sultanate. In the autumn of 1553, he was set upon by Suleiman’s personal guards in a military tent and executed. The route to the throne was now open to Hurem’s sons.
At the time, there was rampant suspicion that Hurem had been critical in arousing her husband’s suspicions about Mustafa to ensure that one of her own sons would become heir to the empire. The evidence remains inconclusive, and it is possible only to speculate that she was involved. If she was, it was a critical episode in the eventual succession of her son Selim as Sultan Selim II in 1566, establishing a direct line of sultans who would rule the empire for many years after their deaths. Back in Istanbul, Hurem continued to influence events and to generate interest throughout Christian Europe.
She became well known for her charitable endeavors, endowing many mosques in Istanbul and other major cities of the empire, including Jerusalem, while also founding hospitals and poor houses. A public soup kitchen was set up at Mecca under her guidance to feed the poorer pilgrims undertaking the annual Hajj to the holiest city in the Muslim world. Several portraits of Roxelana survive from the mid-sixteenth century, though it is debatable how accurately they reflect her real appearance, as the artists in Italy and elsewhere worked from secondhand descriptions and loose sketches. The most famous of these depictions was produced around 1550 either by the great Venetian painter Titian or a member of his school.
The Ottoman queen died on the 15th of April 1558, probably about fifty-six years of age, having suffered for some time from a combination of illnesses, most likely malaria and colic. Prayers were held at the mosque built in Istanbul by Suleiman’s grandfather, Bayezid II. Then her coffin was carried by some of the most senior imperial officials through the city streets to the Süleymaniye Mosque, built by her husband in the early 1550s. There she was interred in the cemetery, where an elaborate tomb was soon constructed to honor the Christian woman who had been taken as a slave from the Polish-Ukrainian border region and who had risen to become the queen of the Ottoman Empire.
Eight years later, in 1566, Suleiman died and was interred in a tomb near Hurrem Sultan. Her legacy extended far beyond her own lifetime. The Sultanate of Women, which she inaugurated, would continue for over a century, with successive powerful women exercising considerable influence over the governance of the Ottoman Empire. The line of sultans descended from her would rule for generations.
From a captive slave sold in the Crimean slave trade, Hurrem had become one of the most influential women of the early modern world, reshaping the role of the imperial consort and transforming the political landscape of the Ottoman capital itself.